Rep. Valli D. Geiger, a Democrat, represents House District 42 (Criehaven Township, Matinicus Isle, Muscle Ridge Islands, North Haven, part of Owls Head and Rockland).

I’ve watched in dismay as opposition research is released on Graham Platner.

I worked at the Togus VA for six years as a nurse and talked with hundreds of veterans. Unless you are a psychopath, if you have seen combat, you likely returned to the U.S. with physical and moral injuries.

You saw things no one was meant to see, you were asked to do things no one is meant to do. Our veterans return from war and many are lost for years. Many struggle with thoughts of suicide, many never find their way back to living a full and whole life.

I’ve talked with veterans who live in cabins in the woods with a dog and a truck, going into to town twice a month for supplies, but otherwise living completely alone, seeing no one.

I’ve talked with veterans who have struggled with depression and substance abuse for years. I’ve talked to veterans with PTSD and moral injury who, with mental health treatment, have rebuilt good lives.

My own nephew was a Marine. He returned from service whole in body but with moral injury.
He was proud, as a squad leader, that his team returned alive. But over the next two years, four members of his group were lost to suicide and all of them struggled.

My nephew, like Graham Platner, sought mental health treatment at the VA and is healing with their support and the support of a loving family.

Graham Platner is a success story. He returned, lost and struggling, but found his way back.

He saw corruption and grift, he returned disillusioned and bitter. He lost his faith in humanity and he found it again. He returned to his hometown, he turned to the sea and the beauty of Maine and with the help of many, became whole again. He built a good life. He became impassioned about what he saw was wrong with this country and he began to speak it.

Platner is a reformer and reformers are angry. He understands that the true enemy of the American people is the oligarchy, the oil men who keep us going to war and burning fossil fuels as the planet heats up, the weapons industry that profits from war and uses young idealistic men as cannon fodder and the politicians who serve them.

And now that his voice is gaining attention and being heard by a wider audience, they are coming for him.

These opponents intend to silence a man who would disrupt the status quo, fight for a better life for those who work for a living, who would demand that the obscene profits of the few are shared by all who made those profits possible.

To those of you who want perfection, who cancel anyone who is less than fully perfect, I say: Graham deserves grace.

To those who say “Thank you for your service” when you see a person in uniform, I say, “Do you mean it? Do you understand what that service entails? What it costs those who serve?”

If we allow the Graham Platners of the world to be taken down in this vicious way, we are telling every combat veteran, and every other person who lost their way for a while, that there is no way back.

That there must be no struggle, no mistakes, no faltering. We are saying there is no growth, no redemption that we will accept. We need a warrior to fight for us and they don’t come without scars.